“Eleazar is in the right. The Romans are irresistible by any force short of the whole people. They have military possession of the country—all your fortresses, all your posts, all your passes. They are as familiar as you are with every defile, mountain, and marsh; they surround you with conquered provinces on the north, east, and south; your western barrier is open to them while it is shut to you; the sea is the high-road of their armies, while at their first forbidding, you dare not launch a galley between Libanus and Idumea. Nothing can counterbalance this local superiority but the rising of your whole people.” “Yet, are we to intrigue with the talkers in Jerusalem for this?” interrupted I. “What less than a descended thunderbolt could rouse them to a sense that there is even a heaven above them?” “Still, we must have them with us,” said Constantius, “for we must have all. Universality is the spirit of an insurrectionary war. If I were commander of a revolt, I should feel greater confidence of success at the head of a single province in which every human being was against the enemy, than at the head of an empire partially in arms. The mind even of the rudest spearsman is a great portion of him. The boldest shrinks from the consciousness that hostility is on all sides; that whether marching or at rest, watching or sleeping, by night or by day, hostility is round him; that it is in the very air he breathes, in the very food he eats; that every face he sees is the face of one who wishes him slain; that every knife, even every trivial instrument of human use, may be turned into a shedder of his blood. Those things, perpetually confronting his mind, break it down until the man grows reckless, miserable, undisciplined, and a dastard.” “Yet,” observed Eleazar, “the constant robbery of an insurrectionary war must render it a favorite command.” [Sidenote: Constantius Describes a Campaign]